May 16, 2015

Baidu’s Artificial-Intelligence Supercomputer Beats Google at Image Recognition
The new computer, called Minwa and located in Beijing, has 72 powerful processors and 144 graphics processors, known as GPUs. Late Monday, Baidu released a paper claiming that the computer had been used to train machine-learning software that set a new record for recognizing images, beating a previous mark set by Google. “Our company is now leading the race in computer intelligence,” said Ren Wu, a Baidu scientist working on the project, speaking at the Embedded Vision Summit on Tuesday. Minwa’s computational power would probably put it among the 300 most powerful computers in the world if it weren’t specialized for deep learning, said Wu. “I think this is the fastest supercomputer dedicated to deep learning,” he said. “We have great power in our hands—much greater


Taking our breach response plan for a test-drive
One thing that we security managers can be sure of is this: There is no guarantee that our company will not suffer a security breach. In fact, the odds are increasing all the time, helped along by the proliferation of mobile devices, companies’ heavy use of software as a service and the consumerization of IT. And let’s face it: Creating a culture that fosters innovation and attracts talent exacts a cost in defensibility. Recognizing that a breach could very well lie in our future isn’t the same thing as surrendering. When something is nearly inevitable, you should prepare for it. That’s the philosophy behind disaster recovery, and I think it should apply to data security as well. So, just as we do testing for disaster recovery, why not do a trial run of our breach response?


A Hadoop data lab project on Raspberry Pi - Part 1/4
This four part blog will provide a step-by-step guide for the installation of open source Apache Hadoop from scratch on Raspberry Pi 2 Model B over the course of the next three to four weeks. Hadoop is designed for operation on commodity hardware so it will do just fine for tutorial purposes on a Raspberry Pi. We will start with a single node Hadoop setup, will move on to the installation of Hive on top of Hadoop, followed by using the Apache Hive connector of the free SAP Lumira desktop trial edition to visually explore a Hive database. We will finish the series with the extension of the single node setup to a Hadoop cluster on multiple, networked Raspberry Pis. If things go smoothly and varying with your level of Linux expertise, you can expect your Hadoop Raspberry Pi data lab project to be up and running within approximately 4 to 5 hours.


Auditing Is IGA’s New Kid on the Block
There is a lot that IGA can learn from SOD controls monitoring. A great, practical example is how auditing has started to appear in IGA products over the last two or three years. Of all the capabilities identified for our critical capabilities research, auditing was one of the most forward-looking for IGA even though such capabilities have been commonplace in SOD controls monitoring products for a number of years. The essence of auditing in IGA is the ability to identify issues with access or data, assign owners to the issues, and then provide a framework for resolving the issues. The framework for resolving issues is usually provided through some type of case management interface, although some products make use of their general workflow capabilities to simulate case management activities.


For Venom security flaw, the fix is in: Patch your VM today
The first thing many of you think when learning this is: "Who cares, I've never used a floppy drive on my virtual machine (VM)!" Ah, but, you don't have to activate the virtual floppy drive for a potential hacker snake to bite you. By default, the legacy floppy drive code is still in there, even though it's never been used. The corruption is still hiding in the code. So, even though you'd never dream of using a VM floppy drive, you're still open to attack. Indeed Crowdstrike maintains that "even if the administrator explicitly disables the virtual floppy drive, an unrelated bug causes the vulnerable FDC code to remain active and exploitable by attackers." Therefore, if you are running QEMU, or virtualization stacks that use it, such a Xen, KVM, and Oracle's VirtualBox, you could be hacked.


10 common SQL Server problems and solutions
This handy two-page list outlines 10 familiar SQL Server problems and an assortment of solutions. From "Out of Space" errors to a database going suspect, this list is great quick reference for every SQL administrator. ... You may need to follow a large chain of blocks to find the head. Once there, you can use the dbcc inputbuffer command to see the SQL statement that the SPID is running. This will point you toward the problem's cause.Join this ongoing discussion and let us know if this download provides helpful information and if there's anything we can do to improve the document's format or content.


Even Robots Now Have Their Own Virtual World
“We are trying to mimic reality as closely as we can,” says Nate Koenig, CTO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which is developing Gazebo, and who has spent the last decade leading its development. “The goal is to easily switch over to a real robot.” Gazebo is part of the Robot Operating System, free and open-source software for controlling various parts of a robot. Because roboticists contribute code back to the ROS project, the operating system has gained considerable momentum as a platform for robot development, especially within academia. Gazebo and ROS are being used to develop many other types of hardware. A researcher in Switzerland, for instance, is using the software to develop an autopilot system for quadcopter aircraft.


ANXPRO Exchange To Include Aten “Black Gold” Coin In 2015
“We are looking forward to offering the Aten “Black Gold” Coin for trade on ANXPRO. The Aten “Black Gold” Coin has a built-in, anti-money laundering control system and is unlike anything in the market today, ” said Lo. “We feel that the NAC’s dedication to AML regulatory practices is similar to our values at ANX. This new crypto-currency simplifies the management of customer identities and our record-keeping requirements.” Marcus Andrade hopes that his company will help to do away with any negative perceptions currently attached to digital-currency like Bitcoin. He said that the NAC is in the process of creating a database only for government officials and banks so they can see the transactions of its clients. Additionally, all governmental entities using the system will be verified.


Microsoft: It's time to shoot the lawyers
Microsoft isn't comfortable releasing products until they are a pain in the axe. Ed describes it thusly: "I blame the lawyers. Every time the discussion turns to anything close to licensing, they bury it in ... fertilizer." ... Microsoft, too, has a core, unwritten mission statement, which I would describe as: "Microsoft builds incredibly deep, powerful, and flexible software products that -- before they see the light of day -- must be infused with a level of unnecessary inconvenience, incomprehensible restrictions, and regressive policies such that all possible joy has been removed prior to customer contact." If Nadella wants to compete in a world with Amazon, Apple, and Google, it's probably time to shoot all the lawyers. Otherwise, there will be no joy in Redmond.


Using Technology To Humanize Finance
“Banking is necessary – banks are not.” Bill Gates said this in 1994. It was a bold statement to make at the time, and one that some have associated with the start of a transformation in financial technology. Now, two decades later, we are seeing this revolution unfold before our eyes.... It is one where large, traditional banks are increasingly facing heavy competition from new entrants – namely, online marketplace lenders – that are delivering a more human lending experience through the technology, transparency and trust that consumers want from their financial services providers. In a March report titled “Future of Finance,” Goldman Sachs analysts Ryan Nash and Eric Beardsley noted that regulatory changes and new technologies are among the top factors reshaping the traditional banking sector and enabling the rapid growth of marketplace lending.


Why analysts should take a predictive approach to problem solving
Skills are needed all around for advanced analytics. This skill set sometimes requires knowledge of recent data-related technologies such as Apache Hadoop. It can require knowledge of analytics techniques and how to use them. On the analytics front, vendor tools are becoming easier to use. Interfaces are easier to navigate than previous versions. Some tools can take data and decide which models make sense once outcome variables are specified. Some tools can even determine appropriate models and then automatically put together the story as output. However, many organizations realize that this behavior doesn’t negate the need for people who can frame a problem, interpret the output of an analysis and communicate the results.

---

Quote for the day:

"Measurement is fabulous. Unless you're busy measuring what's easy to measure as opposed to what's important" -- Godin

---

May 15, 2015

Principal Component Analysis And Singular Value Decomposition
One of the most common dimensionality reduction technique is filtering, in which you leave most of the dimensions and concentrate only on certain dimensions. But that doesn’t always work, when you are dealing with image data, the number of pixels represents the number of dimensions in the image. Now you have lot of dimensions and you don’t want to throw out dimensions inorder to make sense of your overall data set. As the dimensionality of your data increases, the volume of the space increases, in a sense the data you have becomes more and more sparse(scattered). One way to think about it is a very high data set might live in some kind of high dimensional manifold and as you are increasing the number of dimensions, that manifold becomes bigger and bigger.


Why Big Data is bad for science
“Scientific advances are becoming more and more data-driven,” write statistician Jianqing Fan of Princeton University and colleagues. “The massive amounts of … data bring both opportunities and new challenges to data analysis.” For one thing, huge datasets are seductive. They invite aggressive analyses with the hope of extracting prizewinning scientific findings. But sometimes Big Data In means Bad Data Out. Wringing intelligent insights from Big Data poses formidable challenges for computer science, statistical inference methods and even the scientific method itself. Computer scientists, of course, have made the accumulation of all this big data possible by developing exceptional computing power and information storage technologies. But collecting data and storing information is not the same as understanding it.


Lily Is A Self-Flying Drone That Follows You Around And Films You
Whatever you want to call it, the Lily drone uses a combination of GPS and visual processing to track the user. The drone contains an accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer, GPS and three cameras — one camera to do the recording, one that’s looking at the user to visually track them, and another camera looking at the ground to make sure it’s stabilized. Lily also requires a little tracking device you can slip into your pocket or strap onto your wrist. The tracking device has GPS and WiFi that communicates with the drone to make sure it knows where you are — it also has an accelerometer to track how fast you’re moving. The device also has a microphone for picking up sound around you.


Origin EON15-X review: You'll find a desktop CPU in this laptop, and that's a good thing
The EON15-X features two DisplayPorts along with an HDMI out. You get three USB 3.0, a Gigabit ethernet, and a combo USB and eSATA (remember those?) port, plus an SD card reader. There’s also a full set of analog audio ports along with SPDIF. Wireless is an Intel combo 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0. The keys have an odd sculpted shape to them that I’m not completely a fan of, but the trackpad isn’t bad. The lid on the laptop and top keyboard deck has a light rubberized coating too. It makes the laptop a little less slippery when hefting. The laptop weighs in at a hefty 7.7 pounds on your lap and pushes 10 with its power brick. You probably won’t lug it with you every day, but it’s manageable for hiking to your buddy’s house for an ad-hoc LAN party or bringing it to your relatives’ house to cut video.


IT suppliers call on new-look GDS for commitment to G-Cloud's future
“One of the most damaging things to all SMEs, and one that has hurt us personally, is the amount of change in G-Cloud over the years. More change at this time would be a bad thing,” she said. Since the framework’s introduction in February 2012, suppliers have had to deal with numerous changes, including a government-wide alteration to the way public sector data is classified in April 2014. Under the new system, public sector information is labelled Official, Secret and Top Secret, based on how sensitive it is, while the previous system was based on a sliding scale of impact levels. This used a scorecard system of zero to six to demonstrate the risk posed to the public sector should data fall into the wrong hands and was used by G-Cloud buyers to ascertain if the services being offered through the framework were equipped to cope with the levels of security they required.


Lean Start-Up, and How It Almost Killed Our Company
Start-ups work rather differently to how large companies run innovation projects. A big company with a portfolio of innovation products is the perfect place to implement the ‘little bets’ strategy – investing more in this seemingly-successful idea, killing off this poor one. For start-ups a poor innovation product is its only product. When it fails or delivers only a small revenue stream, there are a limited number of times that the start-up can pivot, or kill an idea and start again. Each independent start-up is its own ‘little bet’ – the market gains the benefit of the few that succeed, but that’s not much consolation for the 80% of start-ups that close within the first 3 years. Those that succeed will have a mixture of good ideas, good management, good funding and luck. The Lean Start-Up method fails to say much about the equally important, latter two.


Cybersecurity is a team sport
The US is ahead of Europe when it comes to integrating cybersecurity into its foreign and security policies. Europe would be foolish not to follow and learn from its example. As with most security issues, there are signs that in cybersecurity the default behavior for most European countries seems to be to follow the US approach. For the US, the biggest challenges at the moment are: updating all legal frameworks, strengthening cyber rules of engagement for the military, building cyber deterrents, and clarifying the roles and cooperation of the government and private sector. Europeans can learn from five main take-aways from the US’s new cyber strategy. Cybersecurity must be taken more seriously and planned strategically in Europe. The US’s strategy cybersecurity is more holistic and strategic than ever before.


Blended Analytics: That's What's Next for IT Mgmt
While leading vendors and startups alike have made significant progress in leveraging analytics for offering better IT operational insights, the available ITOA solutions still struggle to effectively deal with IT big data -- operating with a focus on data in narrow silos (APM, log etc.). To really reap the benefits and promise of analytics, IT decision makers need to break these silos and apply blended analytics, an approach that blends and analyzes major sources of IT information. Blended analytics can extract insights and draw intelligent correlations from a variety of data produced by multiple systems across IT silos. By analyzing a blend of data sources together IT Decision makers can see more than the individual components and finally get the whole picture.


The rise of Zombie Apps on the mobile landscape
The first and most obvious answer is to keep an eye on any outdated apps and remove them if you don't need them. If you're an Android user, you can install utilities such as Notification History or App Install History to keep track of when apps were last updated. On iOS 8, you can simply swipe from the top of your screen and tap "Notifications" to review your app update history. If you need an app for the functions it provides but its old and outdated it may be worth finding an alternative that is more recent and performs the same function. However, if you support multiple mobile devices, such as in an enterprise environment, you may need a better solution. Centralized mobile device management which provides the ability to analyze apps and find risks can come in handy. One such example of a solution is Appthority.


Google has an Android security problem
Android remains the most popular mobile operating system in the world with over 81 percent of the worldwide market share. But only a fraction of Android's share is running the software's latest version, with the latest bug fixes, vulnerability patches, and security updates. Official stats say just shy of 10 percent are using Android 5.0 "Lollipop," with about 39 percent running the second latest version, Android 4.4 "KitKat." That's a huge gap, but not close to even older versions. It's almost exactly split fifty-fifty down the middle between Android 4.3 and earlier -- including some 930 million devices that remain vulnerable to a security flaw Google won't fix, and Android 4.4 and later. With about two weeks until the next version is announced -- Android "M" -- the fragmentation problem is expected to get worse. And that means security will get worse.

---

Quote for the day:

"It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance." -- Thomas Huxley

---

May 14, 2015

Quentin Clark: SAP CTO. Technical helmsman. Runner.
"I think, as an industry, we're really only at the beginning of understanding how the cloud will dramatically change how businesses exist going forward," Clark said. Cloud technology has transformed the technology industry in two ways, Clark said. The first is in the delivery model. A lot of the early success of the cloud has to do with this model -- just think about how software, infrastructure, backend, and databases are delivered "as a service" now. It doesn't alter the foundational capability of the company, he said, but it does change how the company spends its energy and maintains its tools, which is still important. The second shift comes from the the things cloud computing has uniquely created and how they are altering the products and industries around them.


Cybersecurity Education Receives a Makeover
In part, experts say, it is society’s fault as people’s increasing desire and dependence on technology make it easier for criminals to hack their way toward profitable endeavors. “We certainly are in an area right now that has seen explosive growth with the Internet, but more importantly, we have, quite frankly, put our lives and our economy and our ways of interacting with business and friends and colleagues and everything into this digital world,” says Rob Roy, federal chief technology officer with HP Enterprise Security Products. “Sensitive information, intellectual property, financial information—that’s all in this brave new world that we’re living in, and it becomes extremely attractive to the three primary groups or individuals who want to use it for bad purposes.”


New Revenue Recognition Rules Require Software
There is a natural relation between principles-based accounting standards and software. In addition to ensuring consistency in treatment and facilitating governance and control, software also is capable of automating the process of presenting a company’s results from multiple perspectives in a consistent fashion. This is important because many companies will find that their statutory books alone will not provide the right numbers to manage their business. Although public company managements will want to see how their numbers look to Wall Street, they may find that these figures are inconsistent with business practices required to achieve sustainable long-term objectives. Software can systematize the simultaneous translation of events into increasingly divergent financial and management accounting contexts.


Are you the wrong type of “engaged” leader?
After all, when leaders consistently connect with their team members in a positive way, they create an environment of open communication. This connectivity has positive business results as well: the DDI survey indicated that “plugged in” leaders had three times less turnover and 83% led their teams to exceed their productivity goals. Yet there’s an irony at play. Consider for a moment two possible meanings of the word “engaged.” One is: to be thoroughly involved, as in, “the employees were highly engaged in the customer service rollout.” Then there is “busy or otherwise occupied.” In order to have the first type of engagement with your team, as a leader it’s necessary to forgo the second. Leadership places many demands on you; are you sending “I’m too busy” signals without knowing it?


The cybersecurity talent war you don't hear about
Finding the right Internet security guru can be as much a challenge as keeping your corporate data safe. Up to now, the hiring process for highly-skilled software engineers has often been haphazard, with some companies putting candidates through as many as 10 interviews, sometimes led by people without the skills to judge a candidate's talents. ... "We recruit global security researchers," said Kaplan. Like HackerRank, Synack tests candidates for the specific skills customers are seeking and does a thorough vetting, including face-to-face interviews. A test might consist of finding known vulnerabilities in a mock mobile-banking application. "This lets us determine if they are as good as they say," said Kaplan. "We weed out over 80 percent of candidates."


Fujitsu pushes wearable IoT tags that detect falls, heat stress
“These sensors stand out for the many business apps such as medicine or security that are easily incorporated through our cloud solutions,” said Tatsuhiro Ohira, a general manager in Fujitsu’s Ubiquitous Business Strategy Unit. As an extension of a company’s awareness of its staff, the tags could raise privacy concerns. Fujitsu said the wristbands could also be used to estimate whether the wearer is taking breaks, or to help manage workers’ health. The sensors are to be rolled out beginning in December but the cost has not been determined yet, Ohira said. Ubiquitousware has also been implemented in the latest version of Fujitsu’s head-mounted display for workers. The device has a 0.4-inch display in front of one eye for looking at assembly manuals, as well as a camera, microphones and sensors such as an accelerometer to detect falls.


Venom vulnerability bares its fangs: Protect your data center with these patches
According to Petr Matousek at Red Hat, "This flaw arises because of an unrestricted indexed write access to the fixed size FIFO memory buffer that FDC emulation layer uses to store commands and their parameters." Some commands in QEMU's virtual FDC fail to reset the index in a timely manner, or even at all -- in which case, further writes made to the FDC can become out-of-bounds. As the attacker has full control over the stored values and nearly full control of the write length, this can be exploited to allow arbitrary commands to be executed from inside the host virtualization process. Of particular importance, this vulnerability is independent of both the host and guest operating systems. Linux guests would require root access to interact with the FDC, and thereby exploit the vulnerability.


Surprise: More Cloud Benefits Are Emerging
Significant organizational efficiencies start when a company goes from managing different technology architectures (Wintel, Linux, RISC-based Unix, disk storage, tape storage, etc.) to simply managing the cloud. Though the streamlining of architecture management may not be significant during initial adoption, it becomes more noticeable as larger portions of the IT infrastructure have migrated. The further an enterprise moves toward a full cloud migration, the more benefits it will reap from managing an increasingly simplified and homogenized environment. Some of the earliest adopters of public IaaS, particularly those in industries not subject to heavy security and regulatory requirements, are seeing significant reductions in staffing, not all of which were obvious when they were writing that first cloud business case.


CIO interview: Hans-Petter Aanby, Scandinavian Airlines
All our infrastructure is new, including a new datacentre in Aarhus run by Danish communications provider TDC.” Not everything can be handled by external service providers though. “It is difficult to outsource the technical expertise required for airline-specific systems such as Amadeus – for reservations – and flight operations systems," says Aanby. "It makes sense for us retain that technical expertise in-house.”  He says SAS’s part of industry network Star Alliance adds challenges when changing systems. “Although being part of Star Alliance is an important strategic move for the company, it adds to the complexity within IT. To change one of the shared products, we must discuss specifications with 26 other airlines."


Applying the Irari Rules to a risk-based security program
The Irari Rules are intended to give someone with minimal technical competence —as is the case with most people in the media — the ability to ask, “Does this attack really meet the criteria of a ‘sophisticated’ attack? Was this an unpreventable attack, or the sign of an unsophisticated security program?” And though the Irari Rules don’t specifically take risk into account, a security professional looking at them should evaluate which of the countermeasures implied by the rules are really too difficult or too expensive to implement. Keeping anti-malware signatures up to date? Having a good password policy? Not having proper network segmentation? When looked at that way, we would argue, most of the implied countermeasures should be mandatory.

---

Quote for the day:

“Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity.” -- Reed Markham

---

May 13, 2015

3D tech brings big data analytics to crime scene investigations
The traditional method of crime scene reconstruction and evidence gathering involves an initial walkthrough and photo documentation. In the course of this investigation, it is critical not to remove or move items at the scene, because any disturbance can call the evidence's validity into question; the evidence must be accepted as tamper proof in order to be authenticated and admitted in court. It's not easy to do. Investigators and forensics experts use total stations, which are portable crime scene mapping units that combine software, hardware, and data collecting sensors into an integrated mapper that records and maps evidence data points. 3D laser scanning technology is providing crime scene investigators with new analytics capabilities.


How Corporate Culture Impedes Data Innovation
Companies able to realize the most benefit from their data are aligning their visions, corporate mindsets, performance measurement, and incentives to effect widespread cultural change. They are also more transparent than similar organizations, meaning that a wide range of personnel has visibility into the same data, and data is commonly shared among departments, or even across the entire enterprise. "Transparency doesn't come naturally," Gilbert said. "Companies don't tend to share information as much as they should." Encouraging exploration is also key. Companies that give data access to more executives, managers, and employees than they did in the past have to also remove limits that may be driven by old habits. For example, some businesses discourage employees from exploring the data and sharing their original observations.


Web-Based Transient Detection Can Enhance Data Center Electrical System
Implementing a web-based transient detection monitoring system can contribute to more effective management of the electrical system. By combining surge suppression hardware and dedicated software that proactively monitors and measures the data center’s electrical system, it can provide a way to detect the occurrence of abnormal power quality events. This provides knowledge about data center management that can be used to predict and address potential problems before they happen. The combined technology goes beyond what is typically available with standard power meters. This type of advanced transient detection system can give the ability to monitor RMS voltage real-time at every connected panel.


Peering Into Computing’s Exascale Future with the IEEE
There is no shortage of “lunatic fringe” computer architectures. What is lacking, Conte and others assert, is the willingness to risk a fundamental overhaul in order to transform computing. It will take a public-private partnership, the IEEE group maintains. Along with the “Three Pillars” of energy efficiency, new user interfaces and “dynamic security,” the list of possible computing approaches ranges from “neuromorphic” and “approximate” computing to adiabatic, or “reversible,” computing to variations on parallelism. Quantum computing, which has attracted much investment, shows promise, Conte agreed. “It’s going to have it’s own niche,” he added, “its own node in the cloud. But it’s not low power.” A more promising approach, one Conte thinks could fundamentally transform computing, is HP Labs’ “The Machine.”


Cyber Attacks on News Organizations: ISIS Changes Tactics to Win Mindshare
Newsrooms are inherently vulnerable as they do not house strong teams of Information Security personnel, nor do they generally possess the world-class tools and architectures needed to defend against sophisticated cyber-attacks. A typical network security tool newsrooms have is perimeter protection, a technology that is an eroding concept. They need to review the impact of today’s standard application security approaches, such as the growing use of cloud technology that can help protect against top-level attacks such as advanced persistent threats, intrusions, distributed denial of service (DDoS) and other forms of highly technical attacks. To properly defend themselves, newsrooms need to implement a much more robust security fabric with higher levels or processes and security.


The rise of the Internet police
The policing requires human intervention because Facebook's systems are only trained to spot and automatically eliminate images showing child exploitation. For everything else, Facebook's teams wait for alerts to come to them. Users can register complaints and call out spam, harassment, hate speech or sexually explicit content. Because it only takes two clicks to begin a report, users frequently point out bad behavior. "It's one of the reasons we make it so easy to report," says Silver. Facebook processes about 1 million legitimate complaints every week -- a sliver of the site's posts. It's not perfect, and the company doesn't identify everything. "It's hard, and at scale, it's impossible," says Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and author of "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace."


Gordon Moore is still amazed at how Moore's Law shaped the tech industry
“The fact that something has gone on for 50 years is truly amazing,” Moore said. Friedman tried to get Moore to predict when the law would run out of steam, but the most Moore would allow is that it could go on for possibly another five years. Moore said he was amazed at how the advances in computing had spawned offshoots from free Internet services to self-driving cars. Though he was the chief technical officer of Intel when he submitted his predictions to Electronics, Moore said he was trained as a chemist, not as a futurist. ‘We’ve just seen the beginning of what computers are going to do for us,” Moore said.  “We’re seeing an evolution in the intelligence of machines,” Moore said. “This is not happening in one step, but in a whole bunch of increments. I never thought I’d see autonomous cars driving down the freeway.”


5 Secrets to DevOps Success
‘BMI’ is one metric used to track your adoption to a good balance in life. Likewise, assessing your adoption of DevOps practices can be a good metric to tracking the proper balance in IT. In light of the challenges that many organizational are facing to achieve the right balance of DevOps, IDC recently released a survey that tracks progress of and barriers to implementing DevOps. They found that IT teams advanced with DevOps adoption in different dimensions at different times: people, culture, technology, business and process. While the people, technology, and process elements evolved along a common trajectory, the culture and business sides prove to be more complex. When implementing DevOps practices and guiding teams to automate incident management, there are five major areas that IT leaders should consider to make sure the right balance is achieved between business needs and cultural development:


Everything you need to know about iCloud Drive
Accessing iCloud Drive on iOS has to be done through individual apps. To open a file from iCloud, you must first tap the icon for the compatible app, such as Pages or Keynote. Within the app, tap the + icon and then tap iCloud. A window will open displaying the contents of your iCloud Drive. Tap the icon of the folder that contains the file you want to access and tap the file name. A copy of the file will then open in the app on your iOS device. If you want to send a file to iCloud from your iOS device start with the file you want to send and tap the Share icon (the one that looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it). Tap "Send a Copy" and select the file type you want to export it as. Then tap "iCloud Drive" and tap the name of the folder you want to save it to. When prompted tap "Export to this location" and your file will be saved to iCloud Drive.


Software detects fake mobile, Wi-Fi networks
A technically skilled person could probably build a fake cellular tower for around $350, while a non-technical person could assemble one for around $1,500, Liwer said. For enterprises with sensitive data, the lower barrier to intercepting mobile communications poses yet another risk to data. CoroNet’s software is a lightweight agent that runs on an Android or iOS device or on a laptop. It is programmed to detect behaviors and characteristics of a base station, as well as those of Wi-Fi networks. It turns out that fake ones leave a lot of clues that they’re probably bogus. ... “Based on that pattern, we know that is probably suspicious behavior,” Liwer said. “A safe network would never behave this way.” If a mobile network looks suspicious, CoroNet can cut off the connection to the fake base station and route the call to the legitimate one.

---

Quote for the day:

“Some men see things as they are and say "why." I dream things that never were and say "why not.” -- Robert F. Kennedy

---

May 12, 2015

Microsoft bids for security edge with new browser
Microsoft Edge is designed to run only 64-bit processes on 64-bit machines. According to Microsoft, 64-bit processes get significant security advantages by making Windows address space layout randomisation (ASLR) stronger. Microsoft SmartScreen, originally introduced in IE8, is supported in Microsoft Edge and by the Windows 10 Shell. SmartScreen defends users against phishing sites by performing a reputation check on sites the browser visits, blocking those thought to be phishing sites “Similarly, SmartScreen in both the browser and the Windows Shell defends users against socially engineered downloads of malicious software to users being tricked into installing malicious software,” said Cowan. Finally, developers say the Microsoft EdgeHTML rendering engine in Microsoft Edge helps in defending against “con man” attacks using new security features in HTML5.


2020 Technology Landscape
Each year, the Citrix Technology Office updates the industry on the latest technology trends with our Technology Landscape. Citrix makes sense of the changes driving these trends, correlating surveys and data from industry sources in addition to adding in Citrix perspectives and data. This year’s landscape is themed “Creating Your Future” and focuses on the many facets of innovation from lean startup, design thinking, and agile development to the outliers of innovation being developed by tech influencers around the globe. We’ve distilled the predictions we think you’ll find most interesting and highlighted them below.


Quantum computing is about to overturn cybersecurity’s balance of power
As do all advancing technologies, they will also create new nightmares. The most worrisome development will be in cryptography. Developing new standards for protecting data won’t be easy. The RSA standards that are in common use each took five years to develop. Ralph Merkle, a pioneer of public-key cryptography, points out that the technology of public-key systems, because it is less well-known, will take longer to update than these — optimistically, ten years. And then there is a matter of implementation so that computer systems worldwide are protected. Without a particular sense of urgency or shortcuts, Merkle says, it could easily be 20 years before we’ve replaced all of the Internet’s present security-critical infrastructure. It is past time we began preparing for the spooky technology future we are rapidly heading into.


Why virtual reality could finally mend its broken promise
There's a graveyard of virtual reality projects that have fizzled, failed, and flopped at various stages of existence. Some never made it off the patent page, like Heilig's 1960 Telesphere Mask. Others got further — if you're of a certain age, you might have owned a Nintendo Virtual Boy for the brief time it was projecting its red and black display onto young retinas. Then, of course, there's Sega VR, which never made it to market. ... "To me, virtual reality represents an evolution of the ways in which we can display, present, and interact with computer generated data and real world environments with augmented reality," Jacobson said. And if you're thinking that's one way to hint at brain implants, then you'd be right. "I think that's the next step after after eyewear, glasses, contacts—a direct brain interface where we think our reality," Papagiannis said.


Key steps to reducing the shadow cloud threat
Shadow cloud can easily lead to wasted time, energy and investments in traditional IT. If employees use non-approved technology, wasted efforts can include training on approved technologies, security technology policies that don't touch shadow cloud, audits and investigations that provide less accurate or effective results, incidents and response efforts due to unapproved technology, help desk and support needed, and bypasses of technology/security controls altogether. ... CISOs must explain risk-based granular security policies and enforcement for cloud implementations to business managers. In turn, business managers need to get the security team to understand how business processes should and shouldn't work when they want to use cloud services. Addressing allowed and disallowed use of cloud services in a policy is the first step to controlling shadow cloud.


What hybrid cloud? It's hybrid IT
"In reality, hybrid cloud has very little to do with datacenter location or data sovereignty. It is where processes increasingly require functionality that spans multiple cloud services," he explained. "Everything we do in business is unlikely to be fully available from just one cloud or even just one cloud provider." He noted that operating a modern business is complex, and supporting all functions necessary in a process typically means deploying several clouds from multiple providers across different geographic locations. These would then have to be brokered, integrated, and orchestrated, he said, giving rise to concerns about how this should be managed. ... "Many IT services firms see their future as a new form of intermediary to provide that single point of accountability, while they deal with the back end of multiple cloud services," Hayward explained.


Shaping Big Data Through Constraints Analysis
The trick is to establish the size and heft of the data, and then focus on how it flows. Computers really do only two things: read data in and write data out. Performance is a function of how much data must move, and where, to accomplish a task. That’s not a facile slogan; it’s a consequence of the fundamental theorem of computing. Every computer is equivalent to a Turing Machine, and all a Turing Machine does is move symbols around a tape. Its throughput is bounded by how fast it can move symbols. This consequence holds true from the micron-sized guts of the CPU on up to world-spanning distributed databases. Luckily, the math is straightforward.


Global banking IT group completes standardised IT architecture
The standard will support banks in using application programming interfaces so different pieces of software can interact. It moves away from an approach that has seen core banking IT built in silos. “Bian members have worked tirelessly to develop this global banking IT standard that will support banks to overcome legacy IT issues and drastically cut the cost of technology integration. To have finalised the model ready for implementation into banks around the globe is a momentous occasion," said Bian executive director Hans Tesselaar. "By implementing this on a worldwide scale, banks will be able to develop and on-board innovative technology offerings without battling through ageing or tangled enterprise architecture, and at lower integration costs.”


Financial technology will make banks more vulnerable and less profitable“Silicon Valley is coming,” warned Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s boss, in a recent letter to shareholders. “There are hundreds of startups with a lot of brains and money working on various alternatives to traditional banking.” Banks’ cost bases—IT systems, smart headquarters, staff, branches and so on—require income from a wide range of services. If even some of those services get “unbundled”, in the parlance of fintechers, the economic models that have sustained banks for decades will be under threat. So the incumbents pay lip-service to the newcomers, and some even have in-house teams scouting for innovators to stop them from eating their lunch. Several factors have made the banks more vulnerable. New technologies such as smartphones and cheap data processing have lowered barriers to entry. However, “technology is necessary but not sufficient” to change attitudes towards finance, says Mike Cagney of SoFi


What the Cowardly Lion and data scientists have in common
Courage is one of those unexpected ingredients of data science that usually becomes an unpleasant aha moment for leaders in the middle of strategy implementation. Courage is the fuel for experimentation and, without experimentation, there is no data science. But it's more than experimentation in the scientific sense. To succeed, programmers need to take risks with code; mathematicians need to reinvent math; and data artists need to color outside of the lines. Intellectually, data scientists know this, but their personality doesn't generally support taking risks, so they don't. ...  They have the unique ability to calculate the risk of taking any route, and they're smart enough to know when something probably won't work. Data scientists also hate it when something they try doesn't work, so they don't attempt to answer the question.

---

Quote for the day:

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake. You can't learn anything from being perfect. -- Adam Osborne

---